Charlie Lee said the following on reddit. I know this issue has been discussed a lot, but what are the models and calculations for a floating fee model? I know satoshi was very aware of this problem, but baking it into the algorithm would have been very hard to do. How do coin users know that the price is fair if the mining oligarchs engage in price fixing? there is no way to tell what the trust costs are.
Satoshi made mining last many many years before transaction fees take over. This is because he knew that it's not sustainable otherwise.
http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/22hqm6/official_an_update_on_the_foundation_core/Satoshi's quote with the 0.1 release:
When that runs out, the system can support transaction fees if
needed. It's based on open market competition, and there will
probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free.
